Keepers of the Light

Whenever Robert Louis Stevenson smelled salt water, he knew he was close to the work of his ancestors. For generations, the Stevenson family had battled storms, shipwrecks and Scotland’s most treacherous seas to build an extraordinary network of lighthouses around its coast. Robert Louis was expected to follow them. Instead, he chose to write.

Writer James Crawford, himself descended from generations of engineers, explores the remarkable family inheritance that Stevenson both rejected and carried throughout his life. Travelling from Edinburgh to Scotland’s far-flung, sea-drenched outposts, he discovers a dynasty of brilliant, obsessive and sometimes difficult men whose lighthouses combined science, ingenuity and artistry, and whose expectations weighed heavily on the young writer.

At the Museum of Scottish Lighthouses, the National Library of Scotland and aboard the Northern Lighthouse Board’s Pharos, James traces the world that gave Stevenson the landscapes, ships, islands and adventures that would fill Kidnapped and Treasure Island. He also discovers the conflict that remained after Stevenson abandoned engineering: his belief that, however famous his books became, they could never serve humanity as well as the lights his family had built.

With writer Bella Bathurst and voices from Scotland’s continuing lighthouse tradition, Keepers of the Light asks what we inherit from our families, what it costs to choose a different path and what ultimately endures.

Edinburgh songwriter Louis Linklater Abbott responds to Stevenson’s story with a specially commissioned song, The Richest Form of Idling, bringing words, music, stone and sea together across the generations.

Producer: Freya Hellier
Sound Designer: Melvin Rickarby
Songwriter: Louis Linklater Abbott

A Tandem Production